AIA Wyoming Hosts Program at National Museum of Wildlife Art

Jackson, Wyoming – September 10, 2012 – AIA Wyoming, a Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) will be hosting an evening program at the National Museum of Wildlife Art on Friday, September 21, 2012 at 6:00 PM. The event is open to the public, and is supported and funded by an award from the Wyoming State Board of Architects and Landscape Architects. The evening program “Health | Safety | Welfare in Architecture” will include exploring unique ways Architects design and create building environments that preserve the health, safety, and welfare for people. Speakers and topics for the public event are as follows:

Presentation: “Place, Climate, and Sustainability”
Place, Climate and Sustainability: the poetics of sustainable design. Sustainable design is not just about performance, metrics and science. It is also about how green principles can be integrated into the design process to add new meaning. Discover how Miller |Hull integrates sustainability into place and climate and discover the impact these design principals effect design in relation to health, safety, and welfare.

Speaker: Robert Hull, FAIA
Robert Hull, FAIA, a founding partner of The Miller Hull Partnership with David Miller, Bob has been the creative force behind the majority of the firm’s higher education and sustainable projects. An award-winning design architect, Bob’s design experience on a wide range of project types goes beyond meeting the program requirements: it is a search for ideal solutions. With over 30 years of practice, he has helped foster within his firm an emphasis on creative team design while providing strong inspirational conceptual leadership. (http://www.millerhull.com/html/home.htm)

Presentation: The National Museum of Wildlife Art: “Transforming a Visitor Experience through the Borrowed Landscape”
Design within the public realm, whether landscape, building or public art, is always based in a particular physical and social context. In places of sublime physicality (most certainly within the Wyoming landscape), a designer’s response to a project must reflect the scale, the textures and performative nature of the surrounding landscape. At the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the landscape strategies engaged this “borrowed landscape” to frame a visitor’s experience that is singular to the Jackson Hole context. The physical solutions for the new sculpture terrace take on a geological framework that is context-based, as the terrace breaks and turns, lifts and fractures to provide a walking experience that is idiosyncratic. Engaging this kind of multidimensional understanding of context can engender the development of powerful sculpted design expressions that explore site specific social and environmental processes. Landscape and architecture can then emerge as improvised acts; a familiar context reshaped into something new. Within this contextual understanding, strategies also emerge to address environmental health and sustainability with strategies that enmesh with the broader ecological systems and processes, ensuring their appropriateness and longevity.

Tour of the Sculpture Trail and Renovation of the National Museum of Wildlife Art
Prior to the presentation, Walter Hood, the designer behind the Museum’s new Sculpture Trail, will lead a tour around the trail. Tom Ward, Principal at Ward+Blake Architects of Jackson, Wyoming, will provide insight on the retrofit that took place at the museum last summer.

Walter Hood
Walter Hood is an Oakland, Calif.-based designer, artist and educator. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s landscape architecture and environmental design department, which he chaired from 1998 to 2002. His studio practice, Hood Design, has been engaged in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research since 1992. (http://www.wjhooddesign.com/)

Tom Ward, AIA
Tom Ward, AIA, a local Jackson, WY award-winning Architect and partner of Ward + Blake Architects. Ward + Blake Architects is built on a distinctive vision: to be provocative in thought, flexible in nature and disciplined in execution. Since 1996, the firm has earned recognition for architecture that is sensitive to its environment and successfully integrated with its surroundings. Ward + Blake Architects create buildings that are tactile, modern, bio-climatically responsible, honestly expressed, technologically sound and artfully crafted. (www.wardblake.com)

AIA Wyoming
AIA Wyoming represents professional architects and allied members throughout Wyoming, providing the architectural community with resources and relationships necessary to improve the quality of the built environment. This organization is the voice of the profession of architecture in Wyoming, serving our members, advancing their values, and providing resources for the design of livable, sustainable places for our citizens. They are dedicated to serving their members, related professionals, and the general public. Membership is open to anyone with a professional or personal interest in architecture and the creation of, or the appreciation for, the built environment. (http://www.aia-wyoming.org/)

Additional Information
For more information on this event, contact AIA Wyoming or info@aia-wyoming.org at
call 307-286-5519.